GREENWICH — On the night of December 22, 1774, a group of South Jersey patriots braved the cold to stage an incendiary protest against British taxation.

The villagers hauled a stolen shipment of tea into the town square and set it ablaze, building a bonfire to express their defiance.

The Greenwich Tea Burning may not be as famed as the Boston Tea Party but it has been a source of pride for generations of residents in the Cumberland County hamlet along the Cohansey River. The town’s centerpiece is a monument, built in 1908, listing the names of the tea burners.

Over the years, folks have re-enacted the event, setting tea on fire during festivals marking centennial and bicentennial anniversaries. To this day, Greenwich’s identity is built around scorched tea as a symbol of courage and independence. The town’s annual charity 5k run is called the Tea Burner Race. Its logo is a flaming crate.

"There were six incidents up and down the East Coast where they destroyed tea," said Bob Francois, a member of the Cumberland County Historical Society who will be giving talks about the tea burning on July 4 at Potter’s Tavern in neighboring Bridgeton.

Francois said, "The most famous tea party was Boston in December of 1773 and our tea party was the last and least famous. It wasn’t in a major city. It was in a backwater Colonial seaport and it didn’t get the attention that bigger cities like Annapolis or Boston or Philadelphia got.

"In Cumberland County, there were no Revolutionary War battles. The tea burning was a major happening in our county and even though it happened back in 1774, it’s still in the forefront and the locals really celebrate it."

There is very little documentation of the Greenwich rebellion, said John Fea, an associate professor of American history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa. He started researching the incident while preparing a doctoral dissertation on a pioneering 18th-century diarist, Philip Vickers Fithian, a Greenwich native who chronicled his experience working as a tutor on a Virginia plantation. In disturbing detail, Fithian described the treatment of slaves and the climate of racism in the South.

Fithian returned to Greenwich (pronounced green-witch) just before the tea burning and penned a brief journal entry about the turmoil in the town square. It’s unclear whether he was an activist or a witness.

"Last night the tea was, by a number of persons in disguise, taken out of the house and consumed with fire," Fithian wrote. "Violent and different are the words about this uncommon manoeuvre among the inhabitants.

"Some rave, some curse and condemn, some try to reason; many are glad the tea is destroyed, but almost all disapprove the manner of the destruction."

Fea said he looked for other firsthand descriptions of the uprising in historical newspapers but was only able to locate one brief article in the Pennsylvania Packet.

"We don’t know a lot about what actually happened that night," said Fea, author of "The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America."

Fea said, "We know about the myths and legends that have grown up surrounding the Greenwich Tea Burning. They’re all based on oral tradition rather than historical evidence. Everything in Greenwich is about memory because these stories have been passed along from generation to generation. That’s fine but there’s a difference between history, what actually happened, and memory."

Francois agreed that the stories told over time have been marred with errors and inconsistencies.

"They had the wrong date up until 1900," said Francois. "They had November instead of December. They got it from some old account that was written down in the old style and the historian that transcribed it just read it wrong. Later they found an account in a Philadelphia newspaper and noticed that the date was different."

Teaching people about the tea burning is important, even if the details are scant, because it is a story of revolt in which the central characters are ordinary individuals rather than war heroes or firebrand politicians, Fea said.

"These men who burned the tea clearly saw themselves as connected to a larger patriotic movement," said Fea. "It’s an inspiring example of grassroots resistance and the way in which local communities connected to the larger Revolution. The tea burning is what the Revolution looked like in a local town."

Greenwich is a secluded village, with a population of less than 1,000, where the main thoroughfare is called Ye Greate Street. It’s right next door to Bridgeton, a once-booming factory town that’s been redeveloped several times over.

"When you drive from Bridgeton to Greenwich, it’s like you’re driving back in time," said Fea. "All of the commerce, all of the trade went to Bridgeton during the Industrial Revolution. Greenwich has remained this remote place where they’ve turned to their history to build their identity. In many ways, the Greenwich Tea Burning is more of a 20th-century phenomenon than it was a 1774 phenomenon."

Controversy

There are dueling narratives about the pandemonium. In one version of the story, the Greenwich patriots wore Native American costumes, emulating the disguises worn by the Boston Tea Party participants.

"Nowhere in the original documents, nowhere in the newspaper article, nowhere in Fibian’s journal do they mention that they dressed like Indians," said Fea.

During re-enactments, as recently as 2008, the people portraying the tea burners dressed in Native American costumes. The practice is offensive, said the Rev. John Norwood, a tribal councilman with the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in Bridgeton.

"While many have an appreciation of the history around the event, especially given the fact that it was a demonstration of patriotism, there are those within the American Indian population who believe that (wearing) Native American garb was inappropriate both at that time and certainly is now," said Norwood, via email. "

When the term "tea party" was revived in 2009 as the name of a political movement, it sparked confusion and resentment in Greenwich, Francois said.

Many residents were upset that activists were using the name of a historical event to brand their ideology.

"There are some people who support the tea party and some people who don’t like it," Francois said of the movement.

According to 2011 New Jersey voting data, Greenwich has equal numbers of registered Democrats and Republicans. Independents outnumber both parties, however.

The Greenwich monument has drawn criticism because it is etched with an inaccurate and incomplete list of tea burners. Jonathan Wood, former president of the Cumberland County Historical Society, acknowledged that some of the 23 people named on the monument "absolutely did not participate."

"The list is very questionable," said Wood. "The tea burning took place at night. It took place with men in disguise. I don’t know how many men it was off the top of my head but we’re talking about something under 50 men.

"The list of names was gathered in the 1830s by Ebenezer Elmer, who participated in the tea burning, but he was in his 80s when he wrote the list, remembering something that happened 60 years back."

Wood said some tea burning mysteries might never be solved. The participants kept quiet for fear of punishment, and within four months the incident was all but forgotten when the opening battle of the Revolutionary War was fought in Lexington and Concord. It took more than 50 years for Jerseyans to appreciate the significance of the Greenwich Tea Burning and begin writing about it.

"It wasn’t famous in the early 19th century," said Wood. "If you look at early histories of New Jersey, it’s not mentioned at all. In 1876, when America celebrated the centennial, that was the time when local history really began to be emphasized."

Wood said there was a connection between the action in Greenwich and a Philadelphia tea protest in October 1773, according to two Cumberland County history books written during the 19th century.

"The tea that arrived in Greenwich came on the second attempt to deliver the shipment," said Wood. "The first attempt was hindered by a group of Philadelphia patriots who called themselves the Tar and Feathering Committee. They said, ‘If you will turn the ship around, there will be no problems at all. If you decide that you will not turn the ship around, you have never seen as much trouble as you are about to see.’ No tar and feathering was done. The ship simply turned around and went back to the European port."

A year later, according to Woods, the British tried to deliver tea again.

This time, the boat left its cargo in Greenwich because the village was known as a peaceful Quaker settlement, Woods said. The intention was to hold the shipment in Greenwich until it was safe to transport the tea to Philadelphia via a land route.
'The hated tea tax'

"It’s been disputed where exactly the tea was stored," said Wood. "People say it was this place or that place but over the past 50 years, we have been almost sure that it was kept in a shed and that shed has been long since torn down. What we know they did is they broke into the shed, got the tea out and set it on fire because of the hated tea tax. It was a copycat kind of thing except they did their own thing by burning the tea."

No charges were brought against Fithian or any tea burning suspects, according to Fea.

"There weren’t any arrests that I know of," said Fea. "A few years after the tea burning, there appeared a court record in the Gloucester County courts in which the owners of the tea sued a couple of the tea burners. The two guys that they sued are actually not listed on the monument."